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How to Search for Your Ancestors and Climb Your Family Tree

Have you ever wondered who is hiding in the branches of your family tree? Is there a U.S. president or a notorious outlaw tucked away behind the leaves? Climbing Family Trees makes it easy for you to find out!

Family history research has become a phenomenon across the world. The Internet has become a powerful tool in helping people find their ancestors as well as reaching living family members. Twenty wonderful chapters will guide and inspire you in:

Digging for your rootsBarking up the right treeGrabbing the best branchGoing out on a limbTasting the fruits of your efforts

Filled with tons of how-to tips, this fun book also includes inspiring true stories from people around the world who have felt the guiding spirit of their ancestors lead them to information they were searching for.

Don’t wait another minute to discover your family’s past and the fascinating stories that await you!

Learn how to research your ancestors on the Internet and use online tools, such as Ancestry.com and familysearch.org, as well as discover hundreds of genealogy web sites that offer free information. You’ll learn how to find census reports, military records, birth and death records, marriage certificates, social security index, archives, and even adoption records.

You’ll also learn about popular family history software and what to do with gedcom files. Whatever your surname, you’ll read about lots of fun ways to celebrate your roots and honor your heritage at family reunions, family gatherings, online, through letters and photos and more.

What is your family crest? Learn how to research it or design your own! You’ll read dozens of fun ideas on how to continue or create family traditions in the kitchen, with artwork, heirloom items, and photographs.

You don’t have to be a professional genealogist to research your family’s history. Discover dozens of free resources and how to access library archives to find your grandparents’ records. You’ll also learn how to identify a second cousin once removed or what to call the cousins of your aunts and uncles or other distant relatives.

The most touching part of the book is the wonderful variety of true stories from regular people like you who had quite amazing experiences while searching for their relatives, both living and dead. Enjoy!

Mitt Romney is so Mormon he's

Earlier this week, Florida evangelical Christian leader John Stemberger endorsed Rick Perry’s campaign for GOP presidential nominee. According to Stemberger, Perry was more “trustworthy” on social conservation issues like abortion rights.

On Romney, Stemberger said: “The issue not that he is a Mormon. The issue is that he wasn’t Mormon enough. If he had been consistent with traditional Mormon values his whole career, that would make me feel a lot more comfortable about where he’s coming from.”

Mitt Romney. Not Mormon enough. Yeah. Right.

Stemberger’s ludicrous assessment of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism inspired an eighteen-hour-stream of “Mitt Romney is so Mormon jokes” on Twitter at @askmormongirl. I’m reprinting the best here, with thanks to the comic geniuses of the Mormon Twitternacle, especially Matt Workman–@matthewworkman–and Jerilyn Pool–@auntmarvel."

(Just a note: for some of these, you may have to be Mormon to understand.)

So, how Mormon is Mitt Romney?

Mitt is so Mormon he’s related to the other Mormon presidential candidate and half of his own campaign volunteers as well.

Mitt is so Mormon his campaign bus is a pioneer handcart.

Mitt is so Mormon he’d call 19-year-old boys to serve as US ambassadors.

Mitt is so Mormon his Israel policy will be centered on Jackson County, Missouri.

Mitt is so Mormon he’ll make the income tax a flat 10% and collect fast offerings to fund Medicaid.

Mitt is so Mormon he’ll ask the Senate to “sustain” his appointees by manifesting with an upraised hand.

Mitt is so Mormon he doesn’t do Pilates, he does golden Pilates.

Mitt is so Mormon that his campaign “oppo” team has done all the other candidates’ genealogy.

Mitt is so Mormon he’s organizing his precinct walkers in pairs to knock doors with a very special message.

Mitt is so Mormon he’d make the Book of Mormon required reading at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Mitt is so Mormon, that if he’s elected the “First Lady” will be known as the “First Wife.”

Mitt is so Mormon he’ll choke up and weep during his inaugural address. And then say, “I told myself I wasn’t going to cry.”

Mitt is so Mormon he’d commission a presidential motorcade built entirely of 10-passenger family vans.

Mitt is so Mormon, he will actually hang the Constitution up by a thread, just so he can save it.

Mitt Romney is so Mormon that he’s afraid to join the Tea Party because of Doctrine & Covenants 89.

Mitt is so Mormon he’ll start the State of the Union with the words: “I wasn’t going to get up, but the Spirit just carried me up here.”

Mitt is so Mormon his campaign biography begins, “I, Willard, having been born of goodly parents.”

Mitt is so Mormon, he will ask members of Congress to go home and pray about his economic plan.

Mitt is so Mormon he’d ask the Elders Quorum to move him into the White House.

Mitt Romney is so Mormon that his first act will be to make July 24 a national holiday.

Mitt is so Mormon, he asks donors to stack chairs after fundraising dinners.

Mitt is so Mormon he refers to expatriates as “apostates” and non-US citizens as “Gentiles.”

Mitt is so Mormon that his campaign slogan is “What do you know about Mitt Romney? Would you like to know more?”

Mitt is so Mormon he’ll reroute the Freedom Trail through Palmyra, New York, Nauvoo, Illinois, and Winter Quarters, Iowa.

Mitt is so Mormon he’ll rename the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms the Word of Wisdom squad.

Mitt is so Mormon he’d do an ad for the LDS Church: “I’m a husband, father, and leader of the free world. And I’m a Mormon.”

Mitt is so Mormon he isn’t as concerned about getting American youth jobs as he is about getting them married.

Mitt Romney is so Mormon he tried to convince CNN to let him bring a visual aid to the debate so he could turn it into an object lesson.

Mitt is so Mormon that he refers to Congress as “The Great and Spacious Building.”

Mitt is so Mormon that out of “concern for the one” he’ll invite Kim Jong-Il to join the fold.

Mitt is so Mormon he’ll end every address with “hope you all get home without any harm or accidents.”

Mitt is so Mormon he’ll assign a friend to every new member of Congress.

Mitt is so Mormon he’s already picked out a room in the White House for his year’s supply of wheat and beans, and he’ll require the White House Chef to rotate the food storage.

Mitt is so Mormon he’ll replace the Secret Service with the Danites.

Mitt is so Mormon his Secret Service codename will be Mahonri Moriancumr.

Mitt is so Mormon he thinks Harvard is the BYU of the east.

Mitt is so Mormon he thought the debt ceiling was something that could only happen in a temple.

Mitt is so Mormon, he doesn’t campaign: he “fellowships.”

Mitt is so Mormon that he’s installing two basketball hoops at the inaugural ball so there’s a place to hang decorations.

Mitt is

OldWrangler Ed taking photos

A Jeep (not cheap) windshield shot of Ed out trying out his new Canon G1X on a few landscapes as we wind around the southern tip of the Henry Mountains.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you read my flickr profile you will see that I usually like to read as much of the history of an area as I can; then visit it; then go home and read more about what I have seen.

In some cases though, I come across things on a road trip I hadn’t heard of before, so I scramble when I get back home to read up on it. That way I will enjoy the next visit even more.

I had never heard of Hatch Rock or the Rockland Ranch before this trip; I had smiled several times when looking at maps when I saw EGGNOG Utah on maps and thought "I need to go there some day". But I knew nothing about Eggnog’s history.

When Ed and I turned his Jeep off of Utah highway 276 south of Tickaboo, Utah – – we traveled the Starton Road and had one ford of Bullfrog Creek, which was nothing compared to our earlier ford of the Fremont River, when we did the Cathedral Valley loop.

Neither of us had traveled this route before so it was exciting for both of us to ride along on a sunny day, with the windows rolled down in Ed’s Jeep, and enjoying the scenery – – stopping often to take photographs, or mark places on the map.

We came to a "T" junction and I pulled out one of the many maps I take on trips like this. To the left is the way we wanted to go following the Burr Trail Road all the way to Boulder, Utah.

IF we had taken a right by mistake (an we almost did), we would have had the pleasure of visiting Eggnog, Utah. Now after reading something of the history of the area, I’m sorry we didn’t visit it on this trip. You can be certain I will visit Eggnog one day. I promise.

So….when I got home I surfed the internet looking for information on Eggnog, Utah. Pretty slim pickings. Then I ran across a long story, well written with an eclectic treatment of the area (cowboys, geology, with a little religion tossed in). Further, the author quoted Robert Service poems, writings by Stegner, Abbey, and one of my favorites – – Joseph Wood Krutch (I have about five of his books).

He even touched on some of the material covered in Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, bestselling book. Krakauer is near the top of my favorite author list.

So there it was….a well written story about Eggnog, Utah and every thing you might possibly want to know about it and the area. I can’t help wanting to share that article. It was written by a fellow named Pete Zimmerman. I will copy and paste Pete’s well written story about Eggnog, and I included a link to the internet address, where I found it, at the end of his article.

If any of you out there in Flickrland, like a good "Western story", as I do, then take the time and read some or all of it. Here it is:

EGGNOG
There’s a land where the mountains are nameless
And the rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair;
There are hardships that nobody reckons;
There are valleys unpeopled and still;
There’s a land – oh, it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back – and I will.
– Robert Service

This is the place.
Smack dab in the middle of stockman Bliss Brinkerhoff’s Big Outfit is the virtually abandoned locale of Eggnog, Utah – sometimes identified as Eggnog Junction – that serves as ranch headquarters. Even though the U.S. Geological Survey persists in classifying Eggnog as a “populated place,” the truth is that no one has lived in Eggnog for many years. As a matter of fact, no one has ever actually lived in Eggnog, Utah, at least not fulltime, other than some seasonal cowboys and temporary miners. “Downtown” consists of a single building (hence the USGS designation), a one-room wooden structure with a dirt floor. Here is where the Brinkerhoff “boys” – now, I’m guessing, in their sixties – bunk down for two weeks each spring and fall and for another week to ten days during the winter, when they’re checking up on the family herd. The 10-by-10-foot line camp isn’t much to speak of, but it does have hot and cold running water and a toilet, plus it’s mouse-proof. A few wranglers have carved their names on the walls.
Curiously enough, Eggnog is too obscure to merit mention in the federal Writers’ Project’s Utah Place Names (1938), Rufus Wood Leigh’s Five Hundred Utah Place Names (1961), or John W. Van Cott’s Utah Place Names (1997). Even to the folks who study such esoteric matters, it appears as if the place with the peculiar name never truly existed at all.
To be specific, Eggnog (elev. 4,470 feet) is located within the boundaries of the federal Bureau of Land Management’s 33,000-acre Bullfrog Creek inventory unit which, according to the agency, “offers outstanding opportunities for solitude,” and whose deep canyons “make it difficult to view or distinguish other individuals who may be present.” The Brinkerhoffs lease a total of 100,000

lds social services

Parley Pratt was born in Burlington, New York, the son of Jared Pratt and wife, a descendant of Anne Hutchinson. He married Thankful Halsey in Canaan, New York on 9 September 1827. The young couple settled near Cleveland, Ohio on a plot of “wilderness” where Parley had constructed a crude home. In Ohio, Pratt became a member of the Reformed Baptist Society, also called Campbellites, through the preaching of Sidney Rigdon. Pratt soon decided to take up the Campbellite ministry as a profession, and sold his property.

While traveling to visit family in western New York, Pratt had the opportunity to read a copy of the Book of Mormon owned by a Baptist deacon. Convinced of its authenticity, he traveled to Palmyra, New York and spoke to Hyrum Smith at the Smith home. He was baptized in Seneca Lake by Oliver Cowdery on or about 1 September 1830, formally joining the Latter Day Saint church (Mormons). He was also ordained to the office of an elder in the church. Continuing on to his family’s home, he introduced his younger brother, Orson Pratt, to Mormonism and baptized him on 19 September 1830.

This biography was written by Parley and published posthumously.

Parley Pratt was born in Burlington, New York, the son of Jared Pratt and wife, a descendant of Anne Hutchinson. He married Thankful Halsey in Canaan, New York on 9 September 1827. The young couple settled near Cleveland, Ohio on a plot of “wilderness” where Parley had constructed a crude home. In Ohio, Pratt became a member of the Reformed Baptist Society, also called Campbellites, through the preaching of Sidney Rigdon. Pratt soon decided to take up the Campbellite ministry as a profession, and sold his property.

While traveling to visit family in western New York, Pratt had the opportunity to read a copy of the Book of Mormon owned by a Baptist deacon. Convinced of its authenticity, he traveled to Palmyra, New York and spoke to Hyrum Smith at the Smith home. He was baptized in Seneca Lake by Oliver Cowdery on or about 1 September 1830, formally joining the Latter Day Saint church (Mormons). He was also ordained to the office of an elder in the church. Continuing on to his family’s home, he introduced his younger brother, Orson Pratt, to Mormonism and baptized him on 19 September 1830.